Sunday, September 30, 2018

It's already been a tough week for many of us who have suffered abuse in the past. Survivors of sexual abuse have had the worst time, I expect; a lot of them have been triggered by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's testimony against Judge Brett Kavanaugh before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday. Her account of what happened to her at a party 30 years ago brought up memories -- for some of them, memories they'd thought long buried.

The good news, if there is any, is many of the folks -- both women and men -- who were triggered sought help. The National Sexual Assault Hotline operated by the Rape, Assault and Incest National Network (RAINN) saw its traffic spike by more than 200%. (The hotline is still open, by the way; you can call 1-800-456-HOPE any time.)

None of the junk I went through would qualify as sexual abuse, thank goodness. There was one time in college when I was on the receiving end of an unsolicited dick pic. Some guy came up to us at a bar (Nick's English Hut in Bloomington, Indiana) and offered to show us a photo of his "friend" -- and then did. He'd even framed it. Unbelievable. Seriously, gentlemen -- if you have a photo of your junk, keep it to yourself.

Still, I learned this week that when it comes to triggers, abuse is abuse. I mentioned in my memoir, Mom's House, that one way I learned to cope with the emotional and verbal abuse I endured as a child was to binge eat. This past Thursday, I spent the day at work avoiding live video coverage of the hearings; instead, I read live blogs of the proceedings to keep up. I might as well have watched the video. I went home Thursday night, ordered a pizza, and ate the whole thing.

The lines between types of abuse aren't clear-cut. After all, abusers typically use more than one tactic to keep their victims on the string. "Don't tell anybody -- this will be our little secret" is, of course, emotional abuse.

Anyway, I'd rather be doing just about anything than writing this post. I'd rather be telling you more about my most recent vacation and how it relates to that #escapevelocity thing I talked about a while back. Or I could be writing about my new knitting project, in which I've adapted a colorwork cowl pattern to double knitting. Heck, I could be working on that cowl right now.

But it's important for us to keep talking about this stuff, no matter how painful. For me, that dick pic is wrapped up with the anger and humiliation I felt when my brother teased me, and it's also attached to the memory of a radio station program director who told me, with a straight face, that women shouldn't work morning drive (from 5:00 a.m. until 10:00 a.m., the most lucrative time slot for air talent) because studies had shown that nobody wants to wake up to a woman's voice. Which I took to mean that hearing a girl on the radio in the morning would remind our male listeners of their unresolved stuff with Mom.

And then there was the time when I was covering an event while pregnant and a local businessman told me he was sure I was carrying a boy, because I looked happy, and every woman was happier with a little Peter inside her. He thought he was hilarious.

I swear to all the gods, I am not making this stuff up.

Which is why I believe Dr. Ford and Ms. Ramirez. I believe any women -- and any men -- who didn't come forward when the thing happened, 20 or 30 or 40 years ago, because they were embarrassed or too young or didn't think anyone would believe them, or maybe they did tell someone and weren't believed, and now some of the details are fuzzy. But the pain is seared into their souls.

I wish I didn't have to write this post. But I'm not going to shut up about this stuff. Because the only way to make it stop is for us to keep making noise.

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These moments of noisy blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Sunday, September 23, 2018

When writers gather, one of the perennial topics of discussion is the comments readers make about our work. Sometimes readers understand exactly what we meant when we wrote the thing we wrote; other times, not so much.

I've seen this in action when I've attended Q&A sessions with various authors. Someone -- often a fan -- will suggest connections between this scene and that, or similarities and/or differences between or among certain characters -- and the author will say something along the lines of, "Hmm. That's interesting. I never thought about that before."

Of course, sometimes authors run across people whose interpretations of their work are so far out in left field that you have to wonder whether they read the book at all.

Be that as it may, this phenomenon of readers reinterpreting authorial intent really bugs some authors -- particularly when it results in a fewer-than-five-star review on Amazon. The thing is, though, there's no point in getting upset about it. Once the author has written the words and put them out there for the world to read, his or her part is done. The rest is up to readers -- who, by reading the author's words, bring the story to life anew. And readers always bring their own life experiences and biases to the work. So it stands to reason that they may see things the author didn't put there consciously -- or things the author never put there at all.

It's not just a bane of writers; all sorts of creative types have this experience. This past week, I was on vacation in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where I paid another visit to the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum. O'Keeffe's work has been misinterpreted from the get-go; her paintings of close-ups of flowers, for example, were viewed by the men of the art world as abstract depictions of female genitalia. O'Keeffe hated that. She was interested in the shapes -- the lines and curves -- so she painted them. It had nothing to do with sex at all.

Later in life, O'Keeffe traveled around the world -- to Japan and to Machu Picchu, among other places -- and she would paint the things she saw in her travels. Which brings us to this painting. It's called Tan, Orange, Yellow, Lavender, and it was first displayed at a New York gallery in 1961, when O'Keeffe was 74 years old.

At the O'Keeffe Museum, a card on the wall explains that the dealer who owned the gallery thought it was a painting of a tree. It's not. It's a system of rivers O'Keeffe saw from the window of a plane. But she didn't correct the dealer: "As for me," she said, "they were just shapes."

What we as authors put on paper are also "just shapes." If we're lucky, our readers will see the same shapes we meant to put there. But not always. And that's okay. Really.

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These moments of interpretive blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Sunday, September 9, 2018

Yesterday, Kat, Amy and I braved the damp to head out to a pick-your-own-produce farm that we've been to before. Kitty was most interested in their late-season peaches; Amy wanted apples; and I was up for Asian pears. The farm's weekly email also mentioned a thing none of us had tried before: pawpaws. So of course we had to snag a few.

Pawpaws grow on trees in a wide swath of the Midwest and South. The trees often grow together in clumps. You may be familiar with "The Pawpaw Patch," a traditional song (as near as I can tell) about sweet little Nellie, who's run away from her friends to harvest pawpaws.

The song has the technique right. Pawpaws are ripe when they fall off the tree. You harvest them by picking them up from the ground -- and they are beat-up-looking things. Here's a photo of a few on a tree (upper right corner), plus some on the ground. One of them must have split open when it fell.

Here's a clearer shot of the pawpaw's innards, plus a few others we harvested.

Whoever first tried eating one of these things must have been a brave soul. They don't look very appetizing, do they? But the flesh is sweet, very soft, and creamy like a mango, with hints of banana or maybe citrus. Pretty tasty. The skin is kind of bitter; Mama Google recommends peeling your pawpaws before eating them.

The seeds are round and flat, about three-quarters of an inch in diameter. I'm told they'll germinate. However, don't expect to see pawpaws at your local Safeway anytime soon: they bruise easily and they don't stay fresh for very long. Apparently you can freeze them or dehydrate them. But Big Ag has other, hardier fruits to make money from.

Now that I've tasted a pawpaw, I can't say that I'm a huge fan. But they're uncommon enough in our urban area that I look forward to finding them again next year.

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These moments of pawpaw-patchy blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Sunday, September 2, 2018

It has been years since I did any embroidery. I used to do it quite a lot, but let's face it, a lot of the designs of yesteryear were pretty bland: flowers, vines, more flowers and more vines. One can only embroider so many dresser scarves and pillowcases before one needs to move on.

Well, gods all bless the Millennials, because they are making crafting edgy. Even embroidery.

I stumbled on a bunch of embroidery kits in a shop in Old Town Alexandria a few weeks ago and was charmed by these new designs -- so much so that I picked one up. The kit is by cozyblue and the design I bought is the Lunar Blossom. Here's what you get in the kit: preprinted cloth, floss, a hoop, a needle, and a photo of the finished item with directions on the back.

I'll be honest -- I picked this kit partly for the moon phases and partly because of all that running stitch. I knew it would work up fast. And yet it's been sitting on the coffee table for the past several weeks, while I've been beating myself up over the knitting and writing I was supposed to be doing.

Now here it is, a three-day weekend, and the highs are supposed to be in the 90s, which is way too hot for knitting. I figured I could get the embroidery project done this weekend and I could say I'd actually accomplished something. So I started working on it yesterday.

Have I mentioned that it's been a while since I did any embroidery? Like decades? I tell you what -- my eyesight was a lot better when I was in my twenties. I finally broke down today and got out my needle threader, so it wouldn't take me five minutes to re-thread the needle every time I pulled the floss out accidentally. (Of course I do that. So do you -- don't lie.)

The directions say you can do any stitch you want, but if you want to do what the designer did, to use running stitch for the petals, backstitch for outlining the moons, and padded satin stitch for filling in the moons. Well, the running stitch went fine. I got three stitches into outlining the moons and realized I was doing split stitch instead of backstitch. But it looked okay and she said I could do whatever I wanted, so I kept going.

Padded satin stitch, though. Regular old satin stitch I was familiar with, but padded? So I asked Mama Google and she gave me some sources. Basically, before you do your satin stitch, you outline the section and then fill it in with whatever stitch moves you; most folks seem to prefer straight stitches, but I also saw some do chain stitch. One woman cut a piece of felt to fit and stitched it in place for the padding. Then once you've done your padding, you do your satin stitch perpendicular to the direction of your infill stitches.

I watched one video where the woman doing it had a very soothing voice -- kind of like Bob Ross but for embroidery. She recommended using one strand of floss for the satin stitches. Her reasoning was that a single strand would produce a more uniform appearance, as multiple strands would twist and not lay flat as nicely. So I tried it her way. It took forever. I did the next moom with three strands, which was a lot faster, plus I liked that it was more poufy. Also, I'm not doing museum-quality work here. Have I mentioned that it's been decades since I've done any embroidery at all?

Here's what I mean. On the bottom is the lovely, uniform single-strand satin stitch; in the middle is the poufy three-strand satin stitch, and at the top is the padding.

Note that the padding isn't even. It doesn't matter whether it's even -- no one's going to see it. You might (if you're picky) notice that my satin stitched sections aren't perfectly perfect, either. Now, I could go back and pull all of that out and re-do it until it's perfect. I'd use a lot of floss and waste a lot of time. And who's going to notice?

A lot of writers agonize over their work. They re-work paragraphs and sentences until they're perfect. They spend a lot of time doing that. Some writers work so hard on the details that they never actually finish anything.

Listen: At some point, you've got to let it go.

Over the years, I've learned a few phrases for just this situation:

You've probably heard this one: "Close enough for government work."

I learned this one from a former co-worker: "Ain't making a watch."

And here's one I heard fairly recently: "If a man riding by on a horse can't tell the difference, it's good enough."

Perfect is good -- but it's also a trap. It's okay to settle for good enough.

I'll probably go back and re-do that single-strand moon with three strands, though. Just so it'll match.

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These moments of imperfect blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.